"Of course, those big company Association members, like Visa and Mastercard, all paid $10 million dollars for the privilege of functioning as validators on the

"Of course, those big company Association members, like Visa and Mastercard, all paid $10 million dollars for the privilege of functioning as validators on the network. Why would they do that? Because they’re going to make a lot of money." --- Long ago I was a management consultant for Amex advising on micropayments (this was decades ago). The consultants answer is always to make a bunch of small bets in a maybe emerging space to preserve optionality. It looks good on a presentation, makes the board reasonably content that they have a future looking strategy, leads to fun follow up work identifying bets which are financially irrelevant to the company if they go to zero, etc... This isn't some grand strategy of Visa and Mastercard. $10MM to those companies is a write-off FOMO punt. If they had put in 20x that amount I would be paying more attention.